PEREZ REITER at L.A. Center for Digital Art

September 12- October 5, 2019

Reception : Saturday, September 14, 6-9pm
ArtWalk Preview: Thursday, September 12, 7-9pm

Curated by:

Joel Ferree
Director, LACMA Art & Technology Lab

Joanna Szupinska-Myers
Senior Curator, California Museum of Photography (UCR | CMP)

Perez Reiter is a collaborative creative duo that interrogates the common ground between visual and built space through computation. They re-write natural events and cultural constructs by translating them into algorithmic procedures. In this process, they take the act of drawing to an unconventional realm, exploring the aesthetic qualities of associative arrangements of thousands of lines. Based between Colombia and Austria, and with a background in architecture, its partners, Irmgard Reiter and Diego Perez-Espitia enjoy the diversity of multidisciplinary and multicultural experimentation. From the movements of the earth below us, all the way to musical landscapes, and the coding of notation systems, their work has a strong sense of spatiality, producing very diverse sensations, from calm subtleties to extreme colourful lavishness.

For their LA show at LACDA Perez Reiter have chosen ten pieces from their series titled Re-written: Quakes where the locations of tectonic plates’ movements that took place in the pacific coast of the Americas, have been encoded into an algorithm written by the artists. With the help of the rigorous administration of data, they draw thousands of lines that depict how the weave of the everyday is torn apart by violent bursts of energy. Massive forces played out along those 8 tectonic plates become subtleties on canvas, their interactions transformed into thin lines on a white background as sequential change interrupts the steady, homogenous weave of the everyday. The continuous fabric of time and space is transformed by progressive intensities, coupled with violent disturbances. At some moments, it stretches, rips, compresses and folds into itself.

Some of the qualities of seismographs remain in these drawings, bringing a dose of rigour and a scientific feel to it. At the same time, strong unpredictability is achieved: meticulous, precise, sharp charts are filtered by a stochastic approach, allowing the depiction of encoded data to acquire a new dimension. As is the case in hand drawing, the richness of the stroke of a line that comes into being by the act of holding a pen, is now addressed by the particularities of a machinic process, both in the writing of the algorithm mentioned above and in the modulated control of the process to burn the canvas. These are not unprepossessing lines, they are full of subtle nuances.